The Uncharted Veterinary Podcast

On this week’s episode of the podcast, Dr. Andy Roark and Practice Manager Stephanie Goss tackle a topic that is being heard on repeat in the clinic these days - what do we do when clients ask the team “Are you vaccinated?” If you don’t want your team to have that deer in the headlights look, listen in to the discussion Andy and Stephanie have about not only what to say and how to say it but some cautionary thoughts for making sure you are protecting the privacy of your team.

Discussion Points

Please do not be caught off guard by this question. If it hasn’t happened yet, it will! Clients want to protect themselves AND this is a source of small talk as we all begin to re-enter the world and start sharing airspace again.

Andy suggests the great idea to consider with your team - what if clients ask if you are vaccinated and on the flip side, what if they ask why DID you get vaccinated? Having these conversations with your team early and often will help them start to wrap their brains around both sides.

Just because this is likely to become more common, doesn’t mean the invasion into their personal lives is right or acceptable. Your team needs to have a common approach that everyone can use, regardless of their personal stake in the situation and their personal opinions. They aren’t representing themselves, they are representing the business.

Your team has a right to privacy. Clients don’t actually need the answer they are seeking when it comes to private medical information. You can help your team feel confident by giving them some language that feels comfortable. Two of Stephanie’s favourite suggestions shared by friends are:

“We cannot disclose anyone’s individual vaccine status. We have team members who have just become eligible for vaccination and/or who aren’t medically cleared to be vaccinated yet. Even with 100% of the team vaccinated, we want you to know what we are doing in addition to vaccine access, to keep you and our team safe. Safety measures include…”

“We are trying our best to make it as easy as possible for our team members to access the vaccine. However, their medical information is private, so I can't disclose anyone's vaccination status, including my own. I appreciate your respect for our privacy.”

Links:

Upcoming events: https://unchartedvet.com/upcoming-events/

Last chance to sign up for New Grad Mentorship 2.0 with Dr. Lindsay Gallagher! Lindsay is going to use her experiences as a new grad and help you harness energy, excitement and formulate a plan to set your new grad up for success. https://unchartedvet.com/product/new-grad-mentorship/

All Links: https://linktr.ee/UnchartedVet

Got a question for the mailbag? Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag

This week on the podcast, Andy and Stephanie dive into a repeat mailbag question - what do we do when someone is in their first 90 days and their “review” is coming due and it is looking not so great. We have received a handful of emails from people asking about how to handle giving feedback that things aren’t going as well as the hospital expects and how to handle moving forward beyond 90 days when you just aren’t loving someone’s performance.

Some of the things that Stephanie and Andy discuss:

The world is messy. Our job as leaders is to balance the needs of the business and the support of our team members. If we have gotten to 90 days and we are just now talking about performance issues, we aren’t really doing our jobs. This is a classic case of where we can set someone else up for failure!

Know the law. Consulting with an employment lawyer before you decide how to proceed with probationary employment is super important. Even if you aren’t considering termination for someone, knowing what should be in your handbook policies and what your probationary period should look like from a policy perspective is super important!

In veterinary medicine, we are often rushing from one thing to the next and we do not take the time to slow down and actually be in the moment. This is where we fail ourselves and our teams. Because giving feedback when it is actionable and someone can affect change in the immediate future is absolutely key. Focusing on something that someone already did and cannot change does nothing but make them feel guilty! Imagine if you were stacking a handful of things that happened in the past together and then sharing them with someone - that could feel super demoralizing and make someone immediately disengage. We talk through “the mention”, as Andy calls it, and how to effectively feed forward so that we are focusing on actionable change that someone can take to improve!

Links:

Upcoming events: https://unchartedvet.com/upcoming-events/

May 30: New Grad Mentorship 2.0

Dr. Lindsay Gallagher will guide you in creating a plan to help you support a recent grad veterinarian in your practice.

Set your new grad up for success, learn the common new grad struggles and how to spot them early, and supercharge your mentorship skills so your new grad will learn faster, work smarter, and love you for it!

All Links: https://linktr.ee/UnchartedVet

Got a question for the mailbag? Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag

This week on the podcast, Andy and Stephanie dive into something that they have been hearing about from EVERYONE… an increasing number of late/no-show clients. There has been a lot of chatter in the Uncharted community about how to balance the team’s frustrations along with the impact that a late/no-show client has on the schedule with the business needs of keeping the schedule full and moving along.

Some of the things that Stephanie and Andy discuss:

Our clients are the reason for our work, not an interruption to it. We are in a customer service industry and if we don’t serve our clients, we won’t have a business model. However…

The customer isn’t always right. It is okay to have boundaries with your clients. Your team and your clients need to understand what the boundaries are and how they will be held accountable.

Hearing your “policy” for the first time when you are enforcing it (or a member of your front desk team is!) leaves a really bad taste in the mouth for a lot of clients. We need to communicate early and often with our clients to set expectations for the behaviors we want.

Likewise, letting your team make it up on the fly when they are faced with the issue is equally a problem. You won’t get the same answer twice, your clients will be confused and so will the rest of the team when they all try to address the issue in slightly different ways. This is a fantastic discussion for a team meeting! Even better, they can discuss how they handle it when there are objections and learn best practices from each other.

We can have empathy and still be clear about the abilities or needs of the practice. We need to focus with our teams on one of the fundamental rules of customer service - sharing what we CAN do for them!

Links:

Upcoming events: https://unchartedvet.com/upcoming-events/

Effective Onboarding: May 19, 23 and 26, Stephanie Goss is going to be teaching some skills, best practices and options for leveraging technology to help onboard new team members and more importantly, introduce them to the practice culture from the start (hint: the start isn’t their first day) so that they are more likely to know who you and your team are and more likely to bond and be retained.

Got a question for the mailbag? Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag

All Links: https://linktr.ee/UnchartedVet

This week on the Uncharted Podcast, Andy and Stephanie chat with Shawn Wilkie from Talkatoo.com. Talkatoo is a desktop dictation solution that augments your current workflow by using speech-to-text capability with specialized vocabularies. We talk to Shawn about how Talkatoo is different from some of the dictation software we have seen in the past. We also talk about how useful it can be for every member of the team in terms of making workflow more efficient and effective, which is something all of us can get excited about. Stephanie and Shawn get a little nerdy about artificial intelligence (A.I.) and how the brain of Talkatoo software is constantly learning and improving both in terms of language specific to veterinary medicine as well as various accents and language challenges that users throw at it! If you have doctors who have massive piles of charts waiting to be written up for days, if you have team members who are scribbling notes to themselves and having to type them later, if you have CSRs who want to make phone call notes go light years faster - check this episode out! You don’t want to miss this.

Links:

Upcoming events: https://unchartedvet.com/upcoming-events/

All Links: https://linktr.ee/UnchartedVet

Got a question for the mailbag? Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag

This week on the Uncharted Veterinary Podcast, Andy and Stephanie tackle another one from the mailbag! We had an email from a veterinarian who co-owns a practice with their partner (who is also a veterinarian). The dream of owning a practice belongs to only one of them and this vet is wondering how to continue pursuing their dream without making their spouse suffer. Because their partner is burnt out and not happy.

Things to consider:

We can’t feel guilty for not knowing the future. All we can do is be honest about our needs and desires, and to listen to our partner about theirs.

According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, 43 percent of small businesses are family businesses with 53 percent of managers in these businesses are identifying a spouse as the family member who is sharing day-to-day management.

Depression is one of the most common mental health disorders in the United States.1 Although the cause is not known, research suggests that depression develops from a combination of physiologic, genetic, environmental, and biologic factors. (Depression. National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/depression/index.shtml. Accessed May 2016.) We need to normalize talking about mental health and depression in the veterinary field.

Sometimes being unhappy in practice causes depression. Sometimes depression causes being unhappy in practice. Enrolling a professional (counselor) will allow you both to zoom out a little and try and figure out root cause(s).

You can’t “fix” your partner. You can support, but ultimately he or she will have to steer this effort. You can’t “guess their needs” to success - they have to be willing to participate.

When someone hits the point of being truly depressed, it’s time for clinical intervention.

Let's get into this episode!

Links:

Upcoming events: https://unchartedvet.com/upcoming-events/

Effective Onboarding with Stephanie Goss: https://unchartedvet.com/effective-onboarding/

All Links: https://linktr.ee/UnchartedVet

Got a question for the mailbag? Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag

This week on the Uncharted Veterinary Podcast, Andy and Stephanie tackle two topics from the mailbag! We had an email from someone who is wondering about the differences between being a leader and being a manager. They shared with us: “I, myself, do not want to “manage” my fellow employees… I am lucky to work with a proactive group of people with high accountability. My mission as a leader is to inspire and empower. To move everyone in the direction we need to go.” Can you be a leader without being a manager? Can you be a manager without being a leader?

Things to consider:

A practice manager can be a leader but they are always going to have to be a manager

You can have team members who lead from within

Everyone wants to think that everyone they work with is capable of being an adult and doing their job. They aren’t. And sometimes they can’t. This is why we

This week on the Uncharted Veterinary Podcast, Dr. Andy Roark and practice management Goddess Stephanie Goss talk about what managers, doctors and practice leaders can and can’t say to employees who smell like marijuana. As more and more states legalize medical and recreational majiuana use, employers are in a new and challenging position. How do we approach an employee who might be impaired? How do we respect people’s autonomy to do what is legal in their free time while still making everyone they work with comfortable and confident while the person is working on the floor? Are we all being too uptight about this stuff? Let’s get into this episode!

Links:

Upcoming events: https://unchartedvet.com/upcoming-events/

April Uncharted Veterinary Conference: https://unchartedvet.com/uvvc2021/

All Links: https://linktr.ee/UnchartedVet

Got a question for the mailbag? Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag

This week on the Uncharted Veterinary Podcast, Andy and Stephanie tackle a topic that is at the forefront for so many of our clinics and hospitals right now - What do we do when a client asks the question “I am vaccinated [for COVID] now, so why can’t I come inside with my pet?” We have been hearing from inside the Uncharted Veterinary Community as well as on all the veterinary forums that everyone is starting to hear this question on repeat. If your team has not heard it yet, consider yourself lucky.

Let's get into this episode!

Links:

Upcoming events: https://unchartedvet.com/upcoming-events/

Effective Onboarding with Stephanie Goss: https://unchartedvet.com/effective-onboarding/

April Uncharted Veterinary Conference: https://unchartedvet.com/uvvc2021/

All Links: https://linktr.ee/UnchartedVet

Got a question for the mailbag? Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag

This week on the Uncharted Veterinary Podcast, what do you do when an employee gives notice that they are leaving and then changes their behavior? We have a situation where an employee who gave notice has asked for special treatment, changes to the schedule and extra compensation. When do you compromise? When do you negotiate? When do you just end the relationship? Let’s get into it!

Links:

Uncharted Virtual Marketing & Strategy Conference: April 22-25th

https://unchartedvet.com/uvvc2021/

Upcoming events: https://unchartedvet.com/upcoming-events/

All Links: https://linktr.ee/UnchartedVet

Got a question for the mailbag? Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag

Edited by: Dustin Bays

linktr.ee/BaysBrass

@Bays4Bays Twitter/Instagram

This week, Dr. Andy Roark and practice management Goddess Stephanie Goss discuss the looming question of how to get your staff and doctors on board with being vaccinated against COVID-19. In a world where employers can legally require vaccination, is it as simple as just telling your staff vaccines are required? Let’s get into this episode….

Links:

Personal Branding w/Dr. Andy Roark: https://unchartedvet.com/personal-branding/

Uncharted April Conference (VIRTUAL): https://unchartedvet.com/uvvc2021/

Dr. Andy Roark Swag: https://drandyroark.com/swag

All Links: https://linktr.ee/UnchartedVet